The Search For Consistency

Lorne Rubenstein

Lorne Rubenstein

Ask any golfer, tour pro or 25-handicapper, about the Holy Grail of golf and the answer you’re likely to hear is “more consistency.” But isn’t the Holy Grail ephemeral, especially for any length of time? The game is too difficult and the mind too unruly. That’s my view and I’m sticking to it.

I’m thinking this — and I’m consistent in saying so — after hearing what Rory McIlroy said today during his press conference at the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C. Somebody asked the four-time major champion what he felt was the most difficult aspect of golf.

McIlroy, who will turn 29 on Friday, answered that maintaining “a consistent mindset” was not easy. He elaborated that golf is very difficult mentally, given that so much can happen out on the 150-acre-or-more arena on which it’s played. Get a bad bounce off what looked like a perfect shot and, well, the golfer can get thrown off.

Suddenly the player’s mindset that seemed so consistent is gone, gone, gone. McIlroy said that sticking to the mindset a player has every intention of retaining is “one of the hardest things in the game.”

That’s consistency with one’s mental game. There’s also consistency with one’s swing. They go together, of course, and neither is exactly easy to capture for an entire tournament, let alone a season or career.

This makes careers such as those that Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Mickey Wright and Annika Sorenstam, among some other greats, have had all the more impressive. Yet I’d bet they wanted more consistency, even in their best years.

Nicklaus’s best years when it came to wins with respect to tournaments entered were in 1972 and 1973, when he won seven tournaments in 19 and 18 starts, respectively. Nicklaus was so good that his fellow players must have believed he would win when he played his best. Nicklaus at his best was better than any other golfer at his best. In 1972 Nicklaus won 37 per cent of his starts. He won 39 per cent of his starts in 1973.

Woods’s best years so far were in 2000 and 2006, when he won nine and eight tournaments in 20 and 15 starts respectively. Woods won 45 per cent of his tournaments in 2000. He won an astonishing 53 per cent of his tournaments in 2006. Like Nicklaus, Woods was so strong a player that his best was superior to any other player’s best.

When Nicklaus played his best, he won — that’s the way it was. When Woods played his best, he won, as he demonstrated. Case closed. But each didn’t play his best every tournament. Nicklaus didn’t win 61 per cent of his starts in his best year. Woods didn’t win 47 per cent of his starts in 2006, his best season when it came to wins.

Here’s another way to look at the much-coveted pinnacle of consistency, especially when it comes to even the best players. Years ago I contacted John Allen Paulos, a math professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, with a question about the probability of Woods winning any particular tournament. He’s entered, by the way, in this week’s Wells Fargo and next week’s Players Championship in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

I’d read Paulos’s books Innumeracy:Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. What in reality were Woods’s chances of winning a tournament? He was being made the favourite in every tournament he entered during the period I spoke with Paulos.

He said that Woods should indeed be the favourite. He was the “most likely” of anybody entered in a tournament to win. But he wasn’t likely to win, because other golfers were winning some 50 per cent of tournaments he entered, even in his best years. The same reasoning applied retrospectively to Hogan or any of the other supernova golfers I’ve mentioned.

Back to McIlroy. Just about every pundit made him the favourite entering the final round of last month’s Masters, even though he started three shots behind leader Patrick Reed. But McIlroy faltered, shot 74, and Reed won by a shot over Rickie Fowler.

Asked after the round what happened, McIlroy answered, honestly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had a decent warm-up.” Golfers rarely do know what happened. Things slip away. Consistency is a Holy Grail, but it’s a wispy, spidery thing. You can’t just grab it and make it your own at will.

Along these lines I think of what Greg Norman has said about the mental side of golf. Norman, one of the game’s elite players despite winning “only” two majors — he was so gifted you’d think he’d have won more, and he came close many times — has referred to the mental “gremlins” that can creep inside one’s mind. Watching a player struggle while in contention, does anybody really know what’s going on inside his or her mind?

Nope.

So good luck, golfers. Yes, try to be more consistent. But chalk it up to that’s golf and you’re human when it proves all but impossible. Then do what Bobby Jones’ instructor Stewart Maiden advised him during one of the 13-time major championship winner’s rare “off” periods.

“Hit ‘em hard,” Maiden said. “They’ll land somewhere.”

Onwards, then, to the Wells Fargo, to The Players, and to next month’s U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y. That’s more than a month away, a stretch during which McIlroy, Woods and their gifted colleagues will continue the mighty, and mighty tricky, search for consistency. They’ll be consistent and constant in their quest, that’s for sure.

In the meantime, fellow golfers approaching the first tee as the season starts in many areas of Canada and the U.S., remember, “Hit ‘em hard. They’ll land somewhere.” Jones said it was the best advice he had ever received.